And they came to Balaam, and said to him, Thus saith Balak the son of Zippor; Let nothing,
I pray thee, hinder thee from coming unto me. For I will promote thee unto very gmat
honour; and I will do whatsoever thou sayest unto me: come therefore, I pray thee, curse
me this people. And Balaam answered and said unto the servants of Balak, If Balak would
give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my God,
to do less or more (Numbers 22:16-18).

Balaam was a prophet. He was not a man of God, but he was a spokesman for God. He later
was executed at Moses' command (Numbers 31:7-8) for the treachery which he had shown to
Israel (Numbers 31:16). But in this earlier incident, he refused to prophecy falsely
against the Israelites. Balak the king sought his counsel and his curse against Israel,
but Balaam refused to co-operate.1

What was true of this "court"
prophet is sometimes (though rarely) true of modern court historians. Despite the
overwhelming unity of professional opinion against conspiracy theories (and theorists),
from time to time a certified scholar breaks loose and publishes a book which demonstrates
the power and influence of conspiracies in history. It is never clear what motivates a man
to make such a break with conventional behavior. It could be professional pride. It could
be anger at some perceived slight. It could be the desire to tell an interesting story
that hasn't been told before. It could even be that the tale-teller doesn't initially
perceive the damage he is doing to those who have successfully sought power. But for one
reason or another, he blows the whistle.

Carroll Quigley

Such a book is Prof. Carroll Quigley's
monumental (and unfootnoted) Tragedy and Hope (Macmillan, 1966). The authors of None
Dare Call It Conspiracy relied heavily on it. Macmillan decided not to reprint it
after 1968, even though its sales were accelerating. But this is normal; book publishers
often cease publishing fat, expensive books that cost a fortune to typeset, just as these
books begin to sell well. As mid-1950's T.V. comic George Goebel used to say,
"Suuuure they do."

Don Bell, a conservative newsletter
publisher, came across a copy of the book in 1966 and alerted his readers to its
importance. Word began to spread. Macmillan then killed it. Quigley's earlier manuscript,
later titled The Anglo-American Establishment, was written in the late 1940's. It
was not published until 1981. It is devoted to the British connections; it barely mentions
the American establishment. Tragedy and Hope for years has been available only in a
so-called "pirate" edition.

Quigley, who died in 1977, was professor
of history at Georgetown University's prestigious School of Foreign Service, and was
rightly regarded (especially by Quigley) as the most brilliant faculty member in the
department. He taught President Clinton history, which Clinton mentioned in his 1992
acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. But be it noted: Quigley did not
publish any of his findings about the conspiracy until very late in his career, and only
because members had turned files over to him (he later claimed). In fact, he published
only one minor, obscure, and totally harmless book prior to Tragedy and Hope.2Was he brilliant? Unquestionably. Judicious?
Unquestionably. He built his early career in terms of the first principle announced in
Proverbs 12:23: "A prudent man concealeth knowledge."

Tragedy and Hope is not all juicy
conspiratorial material. Most of it is straight diplomatic, political, and economic
history. All of it is brilliant. His insights on such otherwise ignored (and crucially
important) topics as Japanese military history and its relation to family dynasties is
fascinating. But it did not gain its notoriety or its sales because of these
non-conspiratorial insights.

Why did Macmillan publish it? If they were
unwilling to reprint the book after it was published, why publish it in the first place?
It is quite possible that it got by a team of editors by mistake. After all, probably 98%
of the book looks conventional. It has no footnotes, so it looks like a textbook, and few
textbooks ever reveal anything unconventional. Furthermore, the Preface looks positively
naive. He predicted the dwindling of the Cold War after 1962, and proclaimed "the
growing parallelism of the Soviet Union and the United States; and the growing emphasis in
all parts of the world on problems of living standards, of social maladjustments, and of
mental health, replacing the previous emphasis on armaments, nuclear tensions, and heavy
industrialization." This was standard liberal pabulum in 1965. In fact, it was
substandard pabulum; in 1965 the Vietnam war was escalating. The head of Macmillan could
not read every book manuscript in advance, especially one so huge that it becomes a
1300-page book. This one probably slipped through the cracks. (This was my conclusion
before I spoke with Gary Allen and Cleon Skousen, who concluded the same thing.)

These mistakes do happen. For example,
Otto Scott, a profound but unfortunately little-known conservative journalist-author (the
man who coined the phrase, "the silent majority"), had his sensational book on
John Brown published by Times Books, a subsidiary of the New York Times. The Secret Six
reveals the details of the conspiracy of Unitarian ministers behind the murderous John
Brown in the 1850's.3The Secret Six hit the book
stores in 1980. Then, according to Scott, the company lost any interest in promoting it.
(This is putting Scott's version as mildly as I can.) He bought back the publishing rights
and all of the remaining copies later that year.

A similar case, according to legal scholar
Henry Manne [MANee], happened to him when a pro-free-market book of his got into print,
and it subsequently outraged a senior official in the publishing company, who told Manne
face to face that he intended to kill it. That book, too, created a minor sensation, but
in the economics profession and scholarly legal circles. This was not the intention of the
publisher, although it had been Manne's intention.

Tragedy and Hope was published two
years before the conservatives began getting excited about it. It initially set no sales
records. Don Bell (of Don Bell Reports) stumbled upon that single copy in 1966 and
featured it in one of his newsletters, but not many people paid any attention. Word began
to get out by 1968. It began to be quoted by Gary Allen in American Opinion, the
John Birch Society magazine, beginning in early 1969. Then Cleon Skousen published The
Naked Capitalist in 1970. This book was basically a compilation of excerpts of
Quigley's book. By 1985, it had sold over a million copies; the first half million came by
1973. None Dare came out in 1972.

Sales of Tragedy and Hope began to
take off in 1968, but supplies of the book ran out, and Macmillan declined to reprint it.
They also destroyed the plates, according to author Quigley. I know one man who paid $150
for a used copy, so tight was supply, before a "pirate" edition appeared around
1975. (The publishers agreed to pay a royalty to Quigley, so it is more of an
"unsuppressed book" than a true pirate edition.) Here is Prof. Quigley's account
of what he alleged was the suppression of Tragedy and Hope:

The original edition published by
Macmillan in 1966 sold about 8800 copies and sales were picking up in 1968 when they
"ran out of stock," as they told me (but in 1974, when I went after them with a
lawyer, they told me that they had destroyed the plates in 1968). They lied to me for six
years, telling me that they would re-print when they got 2000 orders, which could never
happen because they told anyone who asked that it was out of print and would not be
reprinted. They denied this until I sent them xerox copies of such replies to libraries,
at which they told me it was a clerk's error. In other words they lied to me but prevented
me from regaining the publication rights by doing so (on OP [out of print] rights revert
to holder of copyright, but on OS [out of stock] they do not.) . . . Powerful influences
in this country want me, or at least my work, suppressed.4

Several years before Quigley wrote this
letter, Larry Abraham and Gary Allen appeared on a radio talk show where the interviewer
had scheduled Quigley to debate with them over the phone. Quigley immediately denied that
he had written the sensational material that Abraham and Allen had attributed to him. As
soon as Abraham read one of the denied passages over the air, reading directly from
Quigley's book, Quigley hung up. Elapsed time: less than two minutes. So much for extended
scholarly debate.

It seems clear in retrospect that Quigley
never expected the book to become the source of ammunition for the conservatives,
nor did Macmillan. I doubt that Quigley knew what he was getting into when he began the
project in the mid-1940's, when he started doing the research. That Macmillan refused to
reprint it indicates outside pressure. The book was a mistake from the perspective of
those exposed. Whatever their motives for allowing him access to documentary material
(which he claimed that they had),5 they later changed their
minds about the wisdom of this. Or perhaps they never expected him to write a book using
their materials. After all, he had never published anything controversial before, and it
was late in his academic career.

In the late 1970's, Gary Allen received an
unsigned letter. The envelope was postmarked "Washington, D.C." I have seen it
and the envelope. The sender said that he had been a friend of Quigley's, and that at the
end of his life, Quigley had concluded that the people he had dealt with in the book were
not really public benefactors, as he had believed when he wrote it. According to the
anonymous writer, Quigley had come to think of them in the same way that Allen did, and
that Quigley had been very fearful of reprisals toward the end of his life. I believe the
letter-writer.

James Billington

Quigley's scholarship was matched by
James Billington's account of revolutionary movements in the period 1789 through 1917.
Billington's Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (Basic
Books, 1980) is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is one of those exceedingly rare books
which is simultaneously seminal and seemingly definitive  not just a path-breaker,
but a four-lane highway. It is a standing testimony to the failure of all previous,
certified, Establishment scholars to take seriously the role of conspiracies in European
history. Furthermore, while Quigley almost never provided footnotes (though there are a
lot of them in Anglo-American Establishment), Billington buries the reader in
footnotes, in more languages than any of us cares to learn, and from more obscure books
and scholarly journals than any of us cares to know about. The silence from the historical
profession has been deafening. (The same silence also greeted volumes two and three of
Antony Sutton's previously mentioned three-volume bombshell, Western Technology and
Soviet Economic Development.) What they cannot answer, professional historians prefer
to ignore.

Billington focuses on the revolutionary
underground: secret societies, pornographers, occultists, and revolutionary journalists,
who established the basic philosophy and organizational structure of the twentieth
century's bloody revolutionary groups. What he shows is that the "rational"
socialists and revolutionaries of the "left" were from the beginning deeply
mixed up in such things as occultism, irrationalism, and pornography. He exposes the dark
side of "progressive" revolutionary forces.

He does not discuss events after 1917, nor
does he provide much material that would link today's Establishment manipulators (or their
spiritual forebears) to revolutionary movements. What he does do, however, is to
demonstrate that twentieth-century Marxism and socialism were born in dubious
circumstances. Without support from the occult underground and what income and influence
the founders derived from service as popular journalists, there would have been no
"inevitable victory of the proletariat," no "vanguard of the
revolution."

Billington had previously been a Harvard
and Princeton history professor, and is a C.F.R. member. Today, he is the Librarian of
Congress. By all standards, he is one of the highest-level academic "insiders."
They still remember Quigley, whose book discussed the Establishment groups that have
financed such revolutionary groups, and that have used and misused portions of this
revolutionary ideology to further their own ends. Billington did not write a Quigley-type
book, but it turned out to be a spectacular account of the organizational roots of modern
revolutionism.

What is still needed is a comprehensively
researched fusion of these two approaches which demonstrates the existence of a continuing
alliance of the revolutionary underground and the Establishment. With footnotes. Or as
Allen and Abraham wrote in None Dare, pressure from below combined with pressure
from above, "a dictatorship of the elite disguised as a dictatorship of the
proletariat."

This is not to say that Billington was
unaware of this alliance. He does not pursue the topic, but his book begins with the most
important of all these alliances historically, the alliance between alienated segments of
the French nobility (especially the King's cousin, Philip of Orléans) and the perverts of
the Parisian underground. Philip gave them legal and geographical sanctuary and a forum
for their ideas in the gigantic garden spot in central Paris, which he controlled, the
Palais-Royal. As Billington remarks, "Nowhere  the literal meaning of Utopia
 first became someplace in the Palais-Royal" (p. 25). He makes it clear that
the Parisian mob was the tool of this alliance, not an independent force in the coming of
the French Revolution. The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were not the
product of impersonal forces of history. They were the product of long years of conscious
conspiratorial organization and planning. This is not your standard textbook account.

The Hole in the Ship

There is a familiar progression in the
responses of those who are faced with the growing popularity of some heretofore
objectionable idea. It goes something like this:

Step by step, younger scholars are
breaking new ground, and those who once controlled access to the documentary records, and
who sat on the editorial committees of the major publishing houses, are dying or retiring.
The standard interpretations are beginning to change. For example, in discussing the entry
of the United States into World War II, younger historians no longer say, "It isn't
true" when the evidence of F.D.R.'s manipulating the nation into war is presented. We
are at stage two, "It isn't relevant." In short, he needed to do it, and it was
morally proper. When this story gets into the textbooks, as it eventually will, those who
categorically denied it will all be dead, and younger men will say, "We always knew
that."

What the conservatives have been reading
since 1970 in their "unprofessional" little books and magazines is now being
considered by scholars as possible explanations. Their language is less inflammatory, and
their footnotes are different, but very bright men are coming to similar conclusions about
"the way the world works." This development is what the conspirators have to
reckon with today. If ever they are perceived as the losers, the historians will show them
as little mercy as they have shown Hitler, another loser. Relativism-pragmatism has its
risks. These risks are increasing daily.

And when you consider that millions of
young people have been pulled out of the public schools and are being assigned textbooks
that are not state-approved, you get some idea of the threat to the present system. Lose
control of the next generation's educational materials, and a conspiracy is in deep
trouble. They need legitimacy, and a lot of younger people are being prepared to revoke
that legitimacy. The findings of the maverick historians serve as acids in the
ship-of-state's hull.

2 The
Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (Indianapolis,
Indiana: Liberty Press, [1961] 1979). Ironically, it is published by a libertarian
publishing house which is neither conservative nor modern liberal.

3 R.J.
Rushdoony had written about the Secret Six in 1965, but few people have ever read his
chapter on "The Religion of Humanity" in his low-selling little classic, The
Nature of the American System, which was published by a small religious publishing
firm, the Craig Press.